Einaudi

One evening in April 2020, at the height of Italy’s lockdown, Ludovico Einaudi waited until his family had gone to bed before taking out his iPhone to record himself at the piano. 12 Songs From Home is the result—an intimate record of a solitary artist, performing pieces from his most acclaimed solo albums. Since the start of Italy’s quarantine, the pianist and composer had been streaming concerts from home to thousands of fans. “I started to enjoy these connections because I had to cancel my concerts,” he tells Apple Music. “So for those audiences, and also for the many others that had to stay at home, I played a few times.” Einaudi then had the idea of creating a snapshot of those concerts. “I thought that it would be nice to remember the moments that we all shared. So I decided to revisit some of my repertoire over the past years—music from the late 1990s up until now. And I made a collection of 12 songs from different periods. It was a very simple idea.”

Passaggio, Lavinia Meijer's first release on Sony, is an album of the crossover music of Ludovico Einaudi, an Italian composer and pianist who encouraged the Dutch harpist to record some of his most popular pieces. The playing on this 2013 album is highly polished and appealing, and Meijer demonstrates considerable powers of concentration and precision in performances of her harp transcriptions of Einaudi's keyboard music. Some will find Meijer's renditions emotionally communicative and mood enhancing, and most of the credit for their effectiveness belongs to her, because Einaudi's modal harmonies and conventional patterns tend toward a bland prettiness, or pretty blandness, that's all of a piece. Simple melodies and repeated arpeggiated chords have the instant attraction of minimalist music, and simplicity is often a virtue in the proper context. Sony's recording is clear and close-up, and Meijer has presence in a fairly resonant studio space.

udovico Einaudi's aesthetic of emptiness has won him legions of fans worldwide, and Jeroen van Veen's survey of the piano music which is central to Einaudi's style belongs with his survey of minimalists including Glass and Nyman who are less concerned in music as an expressive language than as a commercial artefact. Likewise, his listeners absorb the music less in the sense of engaging with meaning than as backdrop to activity or release from stress. The works on this compendious collection are nearly all 'songs' of between 3 and 7 minutes, with the influence from pop culture that this brevity implies, and sharing with the pop world an economically aware employment of simplicity and repetition so as not unduly to tax the attention-span of the consumer. As Jeroen van Veen remarks, 'Contrary to ordinary classical music, minimal music demands little of the listener but to escape life's troubles for a moment; no comprehensive musical structures ask their full attention.'

Maurice Jarre's score to David Lean's 1965 big-screen adaptation of Boris Pasternak's classic novel Doctor Zhivago remains one of the most memorable soundtracks in postwar Hollywood history – scoring a 2002 British television miniseries remake would seem a thankless task at best and a fool's errand at worst, but Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi's Doctor Zhivago is as breathtaking as Jarre's original, yet cut from a very different cloth.

Outstanding execution by Jeroen Van Veen with superb sound quality. Einaudi's work is difficult to categorize as he pulls classical, pop, new age and cinematic ideas into thoughtfully crafted modern pieces. Highly appealing because it's simply all very good. The most comprehensive set-to-date of Ludivico Einaudi's piano works. - Pianist Joeren van Veen is a prolific and critically well-regarded Brilliant Classics recording artist. - The booklet contains an essay regarding the popular success of Einaudi, written by Mr. van Veen.